All writers are keen to cast spells, even when they fancy themselves as cool technicians. According to The Journals Of Arnold Bennett, on the night of 10 September 1924, Bennett met TS Eliot at the Reform Club. He asked him whether his notes at the end of The Waste Land were serious or “a lark”. Eliot said they were no more of a lark than some parts of the poem. Bennett said he understood that, but still couldn’t see the point of the poem. Eliot said it didn’t matter, because he wouldn’t be writing any more poems like that one: he intended to write plays, and would appreciate Bennett’s advice.

Eliot had come to the right man, because Bennett by that time was making even more money out of his plays than out of his .......

........... Each glimpse of the tree reminds me of a beautiful Italian word my future wife taught me 50 years ago in Florence. The word was scorcio (say “score-cho”). It means a glimpse. From one of our coffee bars we could look down a narrow street and see the spire of the abbey-church of the Badia outlined against the sky. The spire was a revelation of elegance, as my tree is now. Looking back, you realise that glimpses are all you ever get. There is so little time.

I save time on the web by reading nobody’s opinion that contains the word “methinks”. Nor is anyone worth reading who leaves out the punctuation. Those who have no idea where.........

The film star George Sanders was a bright man but lazy. Towards the end he would complain that life was getting repetitive

Clive James

Saturday 31 October 2015 06.00 GMT

Photograph: Alamy

Quote:

.......

Nice people congratulate me for staying busy, as if that were a formula for extending life. It would be good to think so, but sentimental. Last year I was in correspondence with a young lady called Shikha Chhabra, who blogged under the name of Oblomov. She was hungry for life, could write brilliantly about anything, and she died of cancer at 24. Just before she died, she wrote to say that she envied me, because if I was soon to die then at least I’d been given a life in which to do what was in me. It was a reminder of my good luck, which I can’t think of without feeling guilty. But guilt can be an indulgence. George Sanders felt guilty for having had his teeth capped. He was only 66 when he downed five bottles of Nembutal and left a note saying he was bored.

‘The supposed irony that Germaine Greer’s feminist writings helped to create her current persecutors is tosh. They created themselves, like blog-trolls.’ Photograph: Jane Bown

Quote:

My brain is not too fast on its feet lately, so I’ve been a fortnight figuring out what I think about how my eminent contemporary Germaine Greer got herself ambushed by ultra-feminist students because of her opinions about trans women. The only trans person I have ever known personally started life as the man who, when we were at Sydney University together long ago, taught me most about literature. His house was a library and he lent me books by the score. Decades later he started life again, as a woman. She wrote a book of her own, in which she said how miserable she had once been, and how happy she was now. On that evidence I would find Germaine’s opinion at least questionable when she says that trans women don’t stop being men. But there is no question at all about the activists who wanted to stop her saying so. They have no idea of what free speech is or what a university is supposed to be. As for the supposed irony that Germaine’s feminist writings helped to create her current persecutors, it’s tosh. They created themselves, like blog-trolls.

Indestructible microbial organisms, blog-trolls copulate with themselves constantly, producing offspring in the form of lethally insolent..........

‘We’re quite pleased to be in the same business as Taylor Swift.’ Photograph: Imaginechina/REX Shutterstock

Quote:

Lately, I am seldom impressed by the kind of poetry that is just prose arranged vertically. I spent too much time learning how to arrange prose horizontally. But any poet who still writes in rhymes and stanzas is fighting to join a minority. The freedom just to bung it down has won, and few poets now waste any effort on their technique. They might be right.

If they were musicians, however, they would clearly be wrong. As my supply of energy runs low, I have still been glad to collaborate with Pete Atkin on another album of our songs, The Colours Of The Night. As always, I have been chastened by the discipline of the musicians. To match it, I have had to shape my phrases with care. Though the results won’t make anyone a fortune, I take my pay in pride.

Once again there is no publicity budget, but things have changed since the days when the record companies decided your fate. Nowadays, you can press your own discs. Pete and I discuss these matters in a video on the front page of his website: two men of mature years, one in better shape than the other, we pose no threat to Taylor Swift’s earning power, but sound quite pleased to be in the same business.

Young pop stars now are born knowing how the web drives the cashflow..........

All real poets start off by being fascinated by the sound of words. Do they all write something but mean something else?

WH Auden once said that all real poets started off being fascinated by the sound of words.’ Photograph: Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

Quote:

..... WH Auden once said that all real poets start off by being fascinated by the sound of words, but later on they have to grow out of that and start to care about the sense. In that respect,Edith Sitwell never grew up. Her would-be serious poetry was ruined by trivial sound effects. But her would-be trivial poetry could be marvellous, especially the sequence called Façade. Not long after I got to London, I saw a recital of it, complete with orchestra, at the Royal Festival Hall. One of the reciters was the poet herself, typically decked out in flowing robes plus a large soft hat like a golden television pouffe. She was getting on by then, but you could tell she still relished the syllables. Auden would have been obliged to admit that the old girl was a crowd-pleaser. Poetry has to get the audience’s attention in the first instance.

Once, I had a favourite cafe in Paris. I would sit there for hours, reading my way through a pile of books.’ Photograph: John Lamb/Getty Images

Quote:

.... You know that terror is getting its way when you find yourself in a discussion with your daughter about whether your granddaughter should be discouraged from sitting in a Left Bank cafe on her first visit to Paris about seven years from now. At the moment, two of my writer friends are visiting Paris and I have just written to both saying how much I would like to join them and sit in a cafe while we talked, read and wrote: the things we do best. But I can afford that brave thought because I won’t be going there.

‘I came home more determined than ever to enjoy the little things.’ Photograph: Alamy

Quote:

.....my morning antibiotics pick’n’mix must deal with winter’s threat to my tattered lungs, and a few days ago the threat was multiplied by the sudden failure of the heating system in my house.

I had to spend 24 hours wearing a complete set of thermal underwear under thick corduroy trousers and several sweaters: the layered look. The thermostat doodad was successfully replaced only just before I left for the oncology clinic at Addenbrooke’s. I was the only person in the waiting room who looked as if he had mistaken the clinic for a ski resort.

My maple tree has shed the last of its fiery leaves. This is now the actual winter, not a rehearsal. In compensation, my friend Ann Baer* has sent me an autumn maple leaf in its full crimson glory. I have propped it up in the bookcase near where I write. Ann Baer is 101 years old and I am hoping to catch some of her secret.

All the leaves are brown, and our writer’s thoughts turn to big ballads and summers in Sydney

Quote:

...............

It could be said that Adele is Mama Cass born again, but she needs a song to match her voice. I have listened several times to her smash hit, Hello. I was hoping that the shapely beauty of her opening phrase would hook me for what remains of my forever. But the opening phrase never really arrives. The whole number is one of those big ballads in which the singer whispers her way through a verse section that hasn’t got a melody and then goes soaring and bellowing into a chorus section that hasn’t got a melody either. The virtuosity leaves you yawning with admiration.

Whitney Houston drove herself bonkers yelling stuff like that, and Celine Dion at full volume puts up such a barrage that she might be part of Canada’s anti-missile defence system. But Adele still has time for better things. The young almost always have time, as long as they don’t go surfing at night.

Fred Perry’s is a big name for a tiny troll to pinch.’ Photograph: Getty Images

Quote:

No amount of careful writing can overcome careless reading. This thought occurs to me as I try to decode yet another squeal of contempt from one of my regular blog-trolls, who as usual chooses to misinterpret what I say. It’s easy to put up with what he writes, because he scarcely knows how to write it. What bothers me is the name he has picked to hide behind: Fred Perry. Britain’s first, and for a long time only, male Wimbledon singles champion, Fred Perry was a true hero: not only for his skill, but for his courage in facing down the snobbish twerps of the All England Club who would have liked him to feel small because they thought him common.

Fred Perry’s is a big name for a tiny troll to pinch. He might as well keep it, however. If he tries to switch it for something more modest, he will probably call himself Albert Einstein. Judgment is not his thing. What he’s got is untreated umbrage. I’m told that the great political breakthrough of the blogosphere is to give a platform to people not inhibited by qualifications. I suppose I’m in favour of that. I feel increasingly convinced, as the light fades, that attainments aren’t enough to make us good. .......

‘Among our family there was not much Christmas conversation about climate change.’ Photograph: Li Genxing/Xinhua Press/Corbis

Quote:

.... With the fate of the world at stake, one is confident that the money will be spent wisely. Prudent delegates, aware that their frequent-flyer carbon footprint is already questionable, take care not to be thought of as living it up. But sometimes the excitement is too much. During her no doubt vital stay in Paris, Kelly O’Shanassy, CEO of the Australian Conservation Foundation, hit the champagne. As every new flute released its bubbles of CO2, she was so thrilled, she took a picture and sent it to her friends. These sparkling Facebook posts, alas, have since been deleted.

The credibility of her Foundation (“We work across society to influence urgent, transformative action to deliver lasting change”) trembled for a moment, but soon recovered. The climate change matter is too grave to be injured by mockery, as was proved in Paris when With the fate of the world at stake, one is confident that the money will be spent wisely. Prudent delegates, aware that their frequent-flyer carbon footprint is already questionable, take care not to be thought of as living it up. But sometimes the excitement is too much. During her no doubt vital stay in Paris, Kelly O’Shanassy, CEO of the Australian Conservation Foundation, hit the champagne. As every new flute released its bubbles of CO2, she was so thrilled, she took a picture and sent it to her friends. These sparkling Facebook posts, alas, have since been deleted.

The credibility of her Foundation (“We work across society to influence urgent, transformative action to deliver lasting change”) trembled for a moment, but soon recovered. The climate change matter is too grave to be injured by mockery, as was proved in Paris when Robert Mugabe spoke of justice for all mankind. When something as bizarre as that happens, you have to believe a cause is good, or die laughing.......... ....

The odes Keats wrote in his last creative surge are so wonderful that it is impossible to believe the dreadful truth: he was just a boy, soon to be dead from a disease that can now be cured in a trice with antibiotics

John Keats. Photograph: Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image

Quote:

....

Half a dozen people I know, including me, got the magnificent new two-volume edition of TS Eliot’s poetry for a Christmas present. The editors have at last corrected printers’ errors that have bedevilled Eliot’s poems for decades. Reading the editorial notes is almost as enthralling as reading the old man’s besottedly erotic poems for his young second wife, Valerie. He was so unashamedly delighted to have got himself into the category of Old Goat.

Keats never made it, except, perhaps, with the owner of the ripening breast on which he pillows his head in his famous poem Bright Star. But when, in another poem, he writes about “the trophies of my lovers gone”, the poignancy rather depends on our knowledge that the lovers gone were women he would never meet. Yet the odes he wrote in his last creative surge are so wonderful that it is impossible to believe the dreadful truth: he was just a boy, soon to be dead from a disease that can now be cured in a trice with antibiotics .....

In his latest column, Clive speaks of Keats writing in "another poem" about "the trophies of my lovers gone". Looking back to MV448 posted by Clive in 1997, he also states (para. 5) that his title phrase comes from Keats.

But the problem is, where? I can't find it. Keats writes of "cloudy trophies" in his Ode on Melancholy, but the phrase "the trophies of my lovers gone" appears, as far as I can see, only in Shakespeare's Sonnet 31:

Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts, Which I by lacking have supposed dead; And there reigns Love, and all Love's loving parts, And all those friends which I thought buried. How many a holy and obsequious tear Hath dear religious love stol'n from mine eye, As interest of the dead, which now appear But things remov'd that hidden in thee lie! Thou art the grave where buried love doth live, Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone, Who all their parts of me to thee did give, That due of many now is thine alone: Their images I lov'd, I view in thee, And thou (all they) hast all the all of me.

The writer considers whether wordplay can ever be considered witty, even when one’s life might depend on it, in real life as much as in film

Harrison Ford in The Fugitive: ‘The bit I liked best was when he stitches himself up.’ Photograph: Channel 5

Quote:

I fell ill, I have been interested in watching actors repair themselves on screen. The other night I was accidentally watching Harrison Ford in The Fugitive for about the 10th time, and once again the bit I liked best was when he stitches himself up, so that he is ready once again to run away from the relentlessly barking Tommy Lee Jones. Mark Wahlberg needs the help of Kate Mara when extracting a bullet from himself in Shooter. I thus award him fewer points, because the essential thing is to get well on your own.

I even give points to actors who don’t do self-surgery, but merely return themselves to a high state of training. Sylvester Stallone has to operate on himself in Rambo First Blood, but he rescues himself from slob status in the first Rocky movie just by running around Philadelphia every day, until....

'Long ago, I went mad for Django Reinhardt And The Quintet Of The Hot Club Of France.’ Photograph: William Gottlieb/Redferns

Quote:

..........

Having scarcely left my house since winter began, I was in need of a haircut. What hair I have left on my head is sparse, but it was getting long, and one of the last things I want to do before my death is look like Howard Hughes before his. So I hobbled the few hundred yards to the barber’s shop, and afterwards continued hobbling into town, to check out the bookshops.

Temporarily stationed in front of Boots were four wandering Moldavian jazz musicians who filled the air with the kind of contrapuntal intricacy that Jaap Blonk can only dream of. Long ago, I went mad for Django Reinhardt And The Quintet Of The Hot Club Of France. This bunch could have called themselves The Quartet Of The Hot Club Of The Carpathians. The short, stout clarinettist was a wonder: he had that rare knack of sticking to the melody even as he sailed off into the unknown. It’s my favourite quality in any work of art: the framework participates in the skein of grace.

David Bowie’s singing voice was so sweetly beautiful that he sounded interesting whatever he sang. Roy Orbison was in the same category, with the additional appeal, to my mind at least, that he wasn’t concerning himself with intergalactic sexual ambiguity. But in my own career as a pop star, which has always taken place exclusively inside my head, I am blessed with the voice of Johnny Cash: not sweet, not beautiful, but with the tone of command, so listeners are held captive even when they are already held captive, inFolsom prison.

There was a song Cash sang near the end of his life that I now listen to often, near the end of mine. It’s called Hurt. The words are bleak, but his phrasing lends them majesty. When he sings about “My empire of dirt”, he seems to be saying that his life has come to nothing, but we know that he can’t be right, or he wouldn’t sound like that. It’s an untrained voice, but regret has brought depth to it

Students seem to be convinced that if they talk long enough, they can save the world for justice. I was one of them once, and perhaps I was nicer then

Jeremy Corbyn. Photograph: Getty Images

Quote:

For his plan to retain Trident submarines but subtract the nuclear warheads from them, Jeremy Corbyn has been mocked,but perhaps should be praised. His scheme would fit a pattern in which Britain has aircraft carriers but no aircraft to go on them; and it would be another step towards keeping guns but banning bullets, thus to rule out war as a national policy. I admire the way his principles are uninhibited by reason. I also like his beard, which reminds me of one of the beards I grew at various times in my life when I wished to prove I was still a student, even though the years had passed. Corbyn is a student at heart. I was part of the press corps that followed Michael Foot’s kamikaze 1983 general election campaign, and I recognise the look. Foot didn’t have the beard, but he had the same eyes, glittering with goodness.

No doubt the students who want to discuss the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes from Oxford have that same sparkling gaze. They are good people, and he, they have correctly decided, was a thug. But should a cull of statues according to criteria of political acceptability be encouraged? .......